I had a thought the other day about AI that I want to share. I naturally concern myself a lot with how AI affects creative work, and I’ve spent countless hours reflecting upon my own use of it. The creative output from brands and artists are starting to show evident signs of its influence, and the conversation about its risks are currently blowing up. It’s making me reflect upon some fundamental questions about creativity, and quite frankly, the meaning of our lives. What are we trying to achieve with creativity? What makes something creative? Why does it matter?
AI seems to promise endless opportunity in terms of its intellectual capacity, only limitation being our prompting ability. It enables smaller brands and artists with limited resources to make something of similar quality to that of large-scale productions. But within that argument lies a great danger. Creativity is incentivized by scarcity, and made possible by abundance. When we sit down and prepare for our creative act, we are embarking on a quest for beyond that which already exists, and the less we have to work with, the deeper we have to dig within ourselves to find that thing with which we can expand reality. Our external reality is scarce, but our inner world is abundant, and so, the discrepancy gives us the power to make change. What I believe AI is doing is creating an illusion of abundance within our external reality. There is an invisible pull from the pool of abundance away from the one within us to the one on the screen. Suddenly, there is little perceived scarcity in the world. We can do anything. And the more we begin to tap into the external pool of abundance, the more we are leaving our own to dry out.
There is another point to this argument. Scarcity in our external reality is what makes us go on a search and experience it in our own way. We can’t possibly know what it’s like to be on the other side of the world from our own bedroom. We have to choose to go there and sacrifice other ways to experience the world. As we do, we’ll encounter millions bits of randomness that we couldn’t possibly predict beforehand. But these small bits of randomness are what will shape our unique perception of the world. They are the ones that give us clues about ourselves. Such bits of randomness are not readily available, and no one else but you could possibly experience them. AI, on the other hand, removes all of that. It can replicate one person’s experience of reality, 1:1, with another person’s experience of reality. That may not yet be the case, but as our thinking patterns increasingly attach themselves to a shared, artificial center, our perceptions of reality will converge into sameness. And that’s terrible. As humans, we are all different. We are designed to wear our own glasses and bring that viewpoint into the world. We are not ants. We cannot possibly replicate each other, and that friction which is created by our irreplicable differences, is the source of our creative energy. We then use creativity, by working through the friction between us and releasing energy in the process, as a way to settle our differences. To prove the wonderful paradox, that we are different, but all the same. It’s one of humanity’s greatest paradoxes. AI is draining away the friction between us, and with that, destroying one of humanity’s greatest paradoxes. At the extreme end of this, society will be exhausted of all its energy,
As humans, we are incredibly susceptible to making easy choices. Unless we set clear boundaries and goals, the easy choice is inevitable. It seems like we have no idea how to set boundaries around AI. We view it as a magic wand, and we use it for much more than what is appropriate. If we want any hope of tapping into our own pool of abundance, we have to make a choice and set a boundary for ourselves. Regarding creativity, we have to make an agreement with ourselves, that AI is not an option. We have to create our own scarcity. To even get to that sort of existential digging, we have to somehow feel that its necessary, and so, we need to make it necessary. To master a craft and achieve the fulfilment that comes with it, we need to do the dirty digging through piles of mundanity and detail. It’s the heavy lifting that our hearts need to grow strong.
This was my composed take on AI. The rest of this piece was written in a different sitting and in a different emotional state. It’s a bit of a stray away from the introduction, but since we are here for the feeling, the wicked ride, I decided to leave it in. Let’s continue.
AI will rob the agency that we have over ideas. And ideas need to be ours. Ideas are the little sprinkles of the mind and heart that turns mundanity into pure magic. It’s the invisible material that all of society is built upon. Do we want society to be built upon ideas that are not ours? To be an artist is to be eternally searching for our humanity. AI has nothing to do with that. It’s a major fuck-up of the process that brings our life meaning. And I’m not speaking of only artists. I just stumbled upon an article with a mathematician who who found AI to be horrifying. She started crying when talking about it. Because now, the mathematician doesn’t need to grapple with a complex mathematical problem like he used to. The AI solves it much more effectively. Great, except that it misses the whole point. The mathematician wants to solve the problem himself. He wants to bang his head against the wall for a little while. He doesn’t want an agentic smartass telling him in two seconds and through a nice summary with billions lines of incomprehensible code behind it, what the solution is. It sucks the life out of things. It kills the fucking fun.
We can’t just optimize for utility, and growth, and progress, and advancement, and speed and so forth. There is a creative act in any human endeavour on this planet, and we are currently surrendering that creativity. We are hollowing out the process that makes us feel like human beings. It ain’t no fucking fun being creative with prompting. Maybe for a computer scientist and adjacent professions, fair enough, but not for the rest of us. I’m not going to be a creative prompt engineer. I’m just going to be a creative. Oh, so you’re telling me that I can now just focus on the most essential tasks? And that I can focus more on the human aspects of the task, like improving my relationship skills? Well, what if the human aspect of doing my task is to sit by myself, with my own little quirky brain, bounce up and down on the chair, sit on my hands, eat cheetos and crack the task somewhere into the middle of the night? Now I can’t do that, because I need to go out and shake hands with people or learn some meta way of working. Fuck you. I want to do it myself.
To me, AI is is the most blatant proof that growth and advancement are meaningless by themselves. It only has meaning if it makes our lives better, and in many aspects, it doesn’t make our lives better. There is an enormous responsibility on the individual to judge what those areas are, so that we don’t water down our lives. A responsibility we frankly can’t just ask people to figure out and navigate on their own. There are also greater risks at stake than the effect on creativity. One thing is the terminator scenario. The good old sci-fi extinction story. Doesn’t really have a nice ring to it. Write me off as a doomsday prophet or a paranoid cheeto guy, but I don’t think I am. And extinction isn’t even that bad, because at the end of the day, that’s just an outcome. If we die, we die. End of it. Nothing to weep about. The other thing is the life that we live leading up until our extinction. If we are going to be a part of the under 2070 club, we better fucking enjoy ourselves. And unfortunately, AI will give us none of that. It will put us in a chamber, subject us to dripping water torture, and let us die a slow, painful and monotonous death. No fucking rockstar living, and a tragic way to go extinct all together. I’m not going out like that.
As artists, we are not in the game of life and death. We are not building spaceships or making live-saving surgeries. The use cases are undeniable here, and these are the areas where I find AI to be of monumental importance. AI needs very specific use cases, particularly in pushing breakthrough innovation in the battle against climate change and other urgent challenges, rather than the kind of open-source madness we see right now. It should not be a home invasion. It dos not belong in our homes. It should not have a say in the finer details of our lives.
As artist, we are here to create a safe space for failing. To indulge in what has no immediate utility, other than to make us feel more human. We need to insist on that. And I think we need a fuck-off approach. Don’t bow to it. Don’t even think about flirting with it. If you end up doing that, going on a romantic retreat into the woods with it, it’s gonna show up as a dementor, suck your soul out and spit you out as a sorry hunchback version of yourself. You’ll reenter society looking like Gollum, and you won’t be getting no ring on your finger. Except if you marry a humanoid. Don’t ever treat AI like its precious, because its not.
If you’re a writer, I think you ought to be really careful. Your voice is your living, and you severely run the risk of muddling it when engaging with AI. You’ll become a twitchy, neck-cracking cyborg, occasionally switching between human and robotic demeanour. Might sound kinda cool, but it looks shit on paper. I’m still trying to wash my mouth from the conversations I’ve had with my AI. There is a bit of leftover in my system, but I’m getting there. I need it eradicated though. Every day I don’t consult the AI, but everything else around me, my voice becomes a little bit stronger. I have a no-tolerance policy. I won’t judge your past, but if you walk in here with a smelly mouth, I’ll politely ask you to go wash it.
From the standpoint of social media and the content we’ll see, the consequence of AI will be a mass deployment of surface-level shit. You think we are already seeing that? Oh, that’s the very tip of it. The iceberg is gonna tower up like the mountains on Mars. Everyone is being handed a tool, that in the vast majority of cases, is being used as a pump and dump gun, trashing and contaminating the landscape beyond recognition. Surface-level ads, surface-level content, surface-level ideas. Everything will surface, except for that which is beneath it. I’m fairly emotional about this. As I think I should be. This is very, very personal. I’m not even talking about art here. Business in general, what are we producing all these niche AI optimization solutions for? Do we really need to converge towards extreme levels of efficiency in all thinkable business processes? Why do we start businesses? To solve problems, I guess. Are we asking ourselves enough what problems need to be solved? Why don’t we think about the problem, or think about the idea that we want materialised into the world, initially with full disregard to the technology at hand, and then think about how AI may support it? And then lay down some strict groundrules for how to protect the value of human contribution? AI-first is some fuckery. Human first, for gods sake. And not for marketing purposes. For human purposes. Please.
One thing I’m stoked about regarding this revolution is the humanoid. Humanoids are just wonderful, because they are the physical manifestation of this whole thing. And that would allow me to exercise violence, legally. I’ve never been in a fight before, but I would love an encounter with one of them to be my first. When those things start getting shipped from China, I would like to take one of them under my wing, and just absolutely beat the shit out of it. I’ll bring it on a leash to some street-fight dungeon, and unleash on it the worst human possible qualities I’m capable of finding within myself. I wouldn’t even give the remnants to the rats. No way it’s entering into the ecosystem. I would make sure its disintegrated and burned into pitch-black nothingness and removed from the face of our planet. Our beautiful planet. Being humane, means being inhumane to a robot. When I’ve done that, I will come back out into the light of society, take a breath of fresh air, with blood, sweat and tears all over me, give my loved ones a huge, and tell them that I did well today. I did something good. I’m proud of myself. And if the responsibility is bestowed upon me, I will become a murderous robot street-fighter from now and until the end of my days. I will fight the good fight, with heart, honour and uncalled brutality.
Honestly though, I think this is serious. And I want you to be left with the eery feeling, that this is in fact quite serious. We need to carry within our awareness that AI is quite possibly the most serious thing we ever faced in our human history. It’s serious. And I’m not here to be a party killer. Trust me, I’m a fun guy at parties. I say this because I worry, and because action against it is of utmost importance. Think about our kids. A generation of young people is quite simply degenerating. They are being thrown into this tumultuous world, and handed technology that their parents, teachers and leaders don’t even understand. It’s not their fault that their ability to learn and thrive is declining. At catastrophic speed. It’s ours, and we bear a responsibility to protect the foundations that they need in their upbringing. Our generation has a foundation, because we grew up under relatively sane circumstances. But they are not. The declining statistics in the basic thinking processes, reading, writing and math, are deeply concerning. This stuff is carved into the history books as the breeding ground for tyrannical and suppressed societies. We need to be able to think for ourselves, and young people are losing that ability if they can’t read, write and do a 2+2. AI sucks all their attention outwards, so they lose the ability to understand and question themselves. And if that’s the case, they won’t ever get to fully realise themselves in the world. They will have a hard time finding deep meaning, and they will be shadows of what they could have been. It’s haunting to think about, but I really fear that this could be the case if we don’t take radical action.
With that being said, we should always stay hopeful, and beyond all, stay human. Hope can never be clouded by a dark sky. Hope is the light that we always carry with us, close to our bodies. Don’t let the wrongs of the world make you lose hope. It’s the most amazingly human thing to be able to always embrace life and have hope, no matter the circumstances. We have to be able to face the brutal facts of reality, yet still have unwavering faith that we will succeed. That’s a paraphrasing from a great book called Good to Great by Jim Collins. Highly recommend it. When it comes to the AI race across nations, even some of the most evil people in this world will start to break a sweat. Maybe its the common threat we have to face to have us all being brought together. The global AI race will at some point have to subside. We will all have to lay our weapons down to save us from ourselves. There will have to be agreements on regulation that, in our common interest to survive as living beings with living souls, will be respected by all nations. It will become a bond, and the most cardinal of sins to break. I don’t see any other option. No matter how tyrannical some people out there are, tyrants still want to live. Have you watched Arrival? I love Arrival. Amazing movie, and one which holds a lot of relevance to out current situation. It’s about how humanity deals with itself in the face of a common threat. Go and watch it. I just gave you two good recommendations for how to spend your downtime.
The true gift of facing this sort of existential difficulty, is that we are forced to look at ourselves. It’s going to raise deeply reflective questions about ourselves, that will force us out of our complacency and heighten our awareness about what it means to be alive and breathing. I’m sure of that. We are humans, and we don’t give that up so easily. As artists, we are in service to the human spirit, and nothing else. The preservation of independent thought is more important than ever. I don’t want there to be a gap between people predicated on their use of AI, but there is inevitably going to be. You are going to be on the favourable side of that by abandoning AI in your creative work. I don’t doubt that for a second. The more people who can take that path, the better. But sine you’ve found yourself in this forum, I’d encourage you to be one of them.
In addition, companies and organizations need to take stances against AI. We’re way past the stage of waiting for mom and dad to lay down groundrules. Regulators are some slow, archaic motherfuckers compared to the fast-moving weaponry we are being handed, with all due respect to the elderlies. Companies need to lay down their own groundrules and take individual responsibility, rather than letting themselves being dragged shamelessly through the streets by the technological development. It’s not cool to follow the herd. Just take the hit, man. Do what’s right. Stand by it, and your people, and feel your spirit being awakened. We’ve progressed to a point of enlightenment in our human history, where we should now know that the growth of monetary profit is a shit, sole premise for business activity. And yet, it stills seems to be an overwhelmingly important dimension for us to compete along. And we sprinkle a bit of sustainability and triple bottom line bullshit in there to make it seem like that’s not the case, but let’s be honest, we know which one of the lines we are sniffing.
Some actions need to be taken with complete disregard to any sort of strategic imperative or marketing incentive. Moral stances need to be taken for the simple sake of it. The actions that many companies are currently taking to keep up with the pace, is nothing but a devaluation of human contribution. I think it’s completely misunderstood. I’m not saying the people making these decisions are bad people, some probably are, but they are definitely losing sight. That happens when things move too quickly. Companies are great, positive contributions to society when acting in service of living things. When what they do is an act of giving, as much as an act of taking. When they make fewer decisions, and move at a slower pace, and stay within the lane of their mission and beliefs. When they grow responsibly. But how in the world can we trust companies to be in service of the living things in nature and society, when many are decapitating the living things in their own backyard? And sweep the blood off the floor with AI, while the people in the control room prepare the rocket ship to slip right back into the speed-of-light loophole? Too many companies are high off some serious speed. All they see in their dilations is AI. Like they were under possession. AI. AI. AI. AI. AI. It’s giving off killer eyes and slaughterous tendencies. It’s scary, man. The only pill you should be taking is the chill one. We need a lot more respect for human dignity and value. That’s all I gotta say.
Alright, I think we’re at the point where I’ve sufficiently vented my bottled-up feelings. I feel the need to resist on this matter. I can’t help it, and I shouldn’t. I think we should all be resisting the current development, because its not right. It’s the most critical inflection point in human history, in all likelihood, and how we act in the face of it is of existential importance. I will probably have my fair share of battles on this ground in the future to come, but now I’ve expressed my initial standpoint.
Main message: let’s slow this shit down. ASAP.
